Body Hair: Follicular Follies

Why do humans have much less body hair than other primates? Then again, if we really were naked apes, the body hair removal industry wouldn’t be booming and no-one would bother getting more and more parts or their bodies shaved, plucked, waxed and lasered.

So why do we have body hair at all? We actually have the same number of hair follicles over our bodies as other primates. Is our body hair vestigial or does it serve a purpose? And is the burgeoning trend for Brazilian waxing merely a fashion?

Transcript

Amanda Smith: And on RN this is the best of The Body Sphere with Amanda Smith. Today: we’ve all got it, but nobody knows why. Men have more of it than women. And, these days we’re pretty keen to get rid of it.

Mark Elgar: Because it’s you know the difference between males and females, evolutionary biologists will typically start thinking well it must have something to do with a mating preference - that females typically see hairy males as more attractive.

Amanda Smith: Not anymore!

Mark Elgar: That’s right, but perhaps in our Neanderthal past that might have been the case.

Natasha Smits: For younger women, teenage girls, their partners expect it. We do have a lot of younger women who come in and say they wouldn’t dream of not having it done and the boys that they’ve started dating would definitely expect it. I think for older women it’s about confidence, the confidence of feeling that groomed in an area that previously we didn’t really groom.

Meredith Jones: But I wouldn’t be at all surprised if in 40 or 50 years it’s again fashionable in some way for women to have some sort of body hair. You know there was a brief trend just prior to the French Revolution for women to wear almost completely see-through garments and to tease up their pubic hair and actually decorate it with strands of pearls and jewellery.

Amanda Smith: Give that a go at home. So hairy questions and follicular challenges ahead in The Body Sphere: the long and short and curly of why we have body hair and why we’ve invented all sorts of ways to remove it. But also, in the first place why we have so much less body hair than other primates. Mark Elgar is an evolutionary biologist.

Mark do we know why we’re so denuded compared to the hairy apes?

Mark Elgar: I guess the short answer is that we don’t. It’s quite a lively debate, that’s on-going. There have been over the years quite a number of explanations. And many of those early ones in fact were somewhat erroneous in the nature of the question that they were asking, because we’re not as Desmond Morris pithily put it ‘a naked ape’. We do in fact have just as many hair follicles as you would expect for an ape of our body size, but the difference of course is the length and coarseness of our hair is so much different.

Amanda Smith: So you and I have as many hair follicles as a gorilla?

Mark Elgar: Pretty much yes. So the question really is not quite so much as to whether we’ve lost hair but it’s rather there’s been a change in the length and nature of the hair that we have.

Amanda Smith: So do we know why?

Mark Elgar: Boringly no, probably not. These kinds of questions are really difficult to answer because of course we’re talking about something in our past. But I think the prevailing arguments that are kicking around at the moment got are that it’s got something to do with bi-pedalism, our change from walking on all of our limbs to simply walking on our hind limbs. And with that, a change in our exposure to sunlight and so something to do with thermo regulation. Now you might imagine that that seems a bit crazy, why would you have your skin more exposed to the sunlight than having hair all over your body?

And the answer seems to be something around well, if you haven’t got this insulation hair, it allows you to sweat. And the small hair doesn’t get in the way of that cooling process and so you have a very effective whole body cooling process.

Amanda Smith: So it’s about cooling down rather than warming up.

Mark Elgar: That’s right.

Amanda Smith: Alright well that’s one question that people like you have pondered for a long time. But now, a couple of biologists at the University of Sheffield in the UK have asked what’s in a way a more interesting question about body hair and that is why we have it at all. And they got a bunch of volunteers - students - and on one arm of each they shaved a patch of skin and then without the student volunteers being able to see they put a bedbug on either their shaved arm or the unshaved arm. Can you pick up what happened?

Mark Elgar: Yes, a really intriguing experiment and a really fun experiment too, I think they would have had a ball doing that.

Amanda Smith: I don’t know, students with bedbugs on their arms?

Mark Elgar: Yeah well the students themselves may not have had so much fun but I think for the researchers I can imagine they would have had an enormous amount of fun dreaming up that particular experiment. So yes, you’re right, the question that Isabelle Dean and Mike Siva-Jothy were asking is not why we have no hair but rather why is it that we still retain this very fine hair on our body, or on most of our body. Their explanation was that we know that these hairs act as little neuro- transmitters, and the movement of the hair will act as a stimulus to various nerves telling us that we’ve got something on our skin. So it provides us with a warning about what is or isn’t on our skin. And they wondered whether this had a genuine functional affect on various ectoparasites.

Bedbugs, of course, they are not very nice to have on you and the idea is whether this is a line of defence, your hairs are a line of defence against been bitten by bedbugs. And what they found was that where the hair had been shaved the students were less able to detect the movement of a bedbug than where their hair hadn’t been shaved. That might suggest then that the longer or the thicker the hair the more powerful or the more sensitive I suppose the hair is to movement.

Amanda Smith: I’m tempted here to say something about Brazilian waxing and crabs, but perhaps I’ll leave it at that.

Mark Elgar: I think we all thought that. If it is true that your body hair provides a way of early detection of various ectoparasites then clearly you might want to think twice about depilating. And yes, a thought that came up.

Amanda Smith: Yeah, although I have to say that when I read about this study my first thought was actually that the results were counter intuitive, because I thought that body hair is where parasites can hide, like fleas on a dog.

Mark Elgar: Yes. So I think you have to remember of course the relationship between a host and parasites is really a dynamic relationship. And so, we have hairs on our body and they may act as an early warning defence mechanism, and a smart parasite (if you can use that kind of phrase, selection might favour particular kinds of parasites who are in fact able to cling onto the hairs as a means of staying on the body. So yes, it is counter intuitive from one perspective but absolutely not from the other. And the other thing you have to remember of course with these host/parasite systems is that any defence or offense from one side will act as a selection pressure favouring some kind of counter adaptation on the other side.

Amanda Smith: Another question that remains unanswered though by this study I think is that, well anyone who has spent a night in a cheap hotel knows bedbugs are nocturnal; they get you while you’re asleep.

Mark Elgar: Well that’s right and I think that’s the major limitation of this particular study. I think the ideal experiment would have been to have done this when the students were asleep and then looked at whatever movements they might have made to try and brush off these bedbugs, whilst they were asleep. But I think the other side of this is to simply move away from just thinking about the specific species and the question addressed is can we actually detect the movement of things on our skin through these hairs? And that they absolutely demonstrated, so yes, this really does confirm, and in a very simple experiment but a very powerful one, that these things act as a kind of early warning defence.

Amanda Smith: And as you said it seems that the hairier you are, the more body hair you have, the more likely you are, the more sensitive you are, to detecting something on your skin. Now, men have more body hair than women so I’m just wondering then, if what the study has found is true, is there an evolutionary purpose to men being able to detect bedbugs or parasites on their skin...

Mark Elgar: I’m not sure that that’s necessarily the case because it’s quite possible that it’s actually the movement of the hair right at the surface of the skin that’s critically important. So the length of hair may in fact not have anything to do with it. But you know this is something that hasn’t really, as far as I’m aware, been investigated.

Amanda Smith: Are there other reasons that have been posited for why women aren’t as hairy as men on their bodies?

Mark Elgar: Well the development of hair on human bodies is driven by hormones and it’s the predominant male hormone androgen that stimulates the growth of body hair on men, it’s not produced in such quantities in women and so you don’t have that strong stimulus for the growth of body hair. That’s a mechanism, I mean that’s in a sense what causes the difference but exactly why there is such a difference between the two I think still remains something of a broad question. Because it’s, you know, the difference between males and females, often it does sit around the idea of a mating preference: that females typically see hairy males as more attractive for whatever reason.

Amanda Smith: Not anymore!

Mark Elgar: No that’s right. But perhaps in our Neanderthal past that might have been the case. Or alternatively of course another way of looking at it is that the hairy male is actually signalling to other males: ‘Look out, I’m a big hairy monster and I can knock you out of the way if you irritate me’. So it can be both a case of female preference or it might be some cue in the context of competition between males.

Amanda Smith: And Mark Elgar is Professor of Evolutionary Biology at Melbourne University.

You’re listening to The Body Sphere on RN. I’m Amanda Smith and I’ve got an appointment now at the beauty parlour.

Natasha Smits: Hello would you like to come on in.

OK – how’s your day been?

Amanda Smith: Fine thanks Natasha. I’m at Natasha’s Skin and Body Salon and Natasha is just about to do some hair removal on me, some waxing on my legs. Ouch.

Natasha Smits: How’s that feeling

Amanda Smith: Yeah, okay.

Natasha Smits: Did you ever have waxing when it was the old days of filtering the wax?

Amanda Smith: I can’t remember.

Natasha Smits: So where they used to put it on and it would set and then you rip it off, and then at the end of the day it used to go into a big old pot with a sieve in it ,a mesh sieve, and they would filter out all of the dead hairs. And every night in the salon they’d turn the wax up to boiling point and it would burn the hair off the top, I kid you not. And you’d come in in the morning and the salons would smell like burnt hair. It was disgusting.

Amanda Smith: The secrets of a salon, I never knew any of this.

Natasha Smits: It was the bad old days before the Health Department got involved.

Amanda Smith: So Natasha I’m interested actually talking to you about more intimate areas of hair removal than my legs: Brazilian waxing . Now, the trend for complete removal of pubic hair, do you reckon that this has increased in the time you’ve been involved in the industry?

Natasha Smits: Hugely, so when I first trained I can remember being at Beauty Therapy College and thinking I want to know about this Brazilian waxing and it actually had just begun at the time with Vogue magazine covering a salon called The Jay Sisters in New York, Brazilian sisters who had taken the trend of full pubic waxing and open a salon based around it. And someone from Vogue went and got waxed and it was all over the world, people were asking for it everywhere. And I was in New Zealand, in Auckland, and you couldn’t get one. There was just no one, I remember going from salon to salon wanting to find out about this Brazilian wax, determined I was going to do it, because I was about to graduate and I wanted to be in on it.

In the end I went to a little salon upstairs in a shopping centre and a lady said look, I don’t know how to do it but I’ll give it a go. Well we were there for 2 hours, no gloves, it was the dirtiest little salon you’ve ever been to, it was actually terrifying but however, I got a Brazilian wax and I walked out crying, just about. And then I went home and my friends and I learnt on each other and eventually the school said god, we’d better teach these girls how to do it because they are learning on their own. And that was only ten years ago and people weren’t really being trained. Now it’s a post graduate course that the girls can do but every salon offers it now and it would be very rare to find a salon that doesn’t offer it.

Just keep that one straight for me – thank you.

Amanda Smith: Is it a generational thing among women, having that done? You know is it largely younger women?

Natasha Smits: Younger women tend to start it rather than having, where you’ve got older women who might have had bikini waxes for a long time and then started to have Brazilian waxing, anyone in their 30s and below will just be looking for Brazilian waxing. And in fact it’s very rare for us to even do a bikini wax in my salon.

Amanda Smith: Because everyone is getting the full monty.

Natasha Smits: Everyone does the full monty yeah. And the therapists probably encourage it because to be honest it’s easier, it’s just as easy to do a Brazilian as it is to do a bikini wax, it takes the same amount of time.

Amanda Smith: Except it’s much more intimate. I mean what is it like to do something as intimate as remove all of someone’s pubic hair?

Natasha Smits: There is a fantastic beauty therapist who works in Toorak and she summed it up best when she said, someone asked her you know what is it like to look at another woman’s private parts. And she just said I have never seen one. And it’s true, you just don’t see it, you’re there to do a job and you really don’t see what you’re looking at. You don’t have time, you’re always moving, there’s always something to be put on, or removed, or stretched, or whatever you’re doing. You just don’t see it.

Amanda Smith: Do you get any clients who are though wanting it done but uncomfortable about having it done?

Natasha Smits: Yes in other salons I’ve worked in yes, we have come across those people. But when people enquire, just from the very moment people ask, we are saying yes it’s something we do, we do lots of them, it’s completely normal so by the time people get on the bed I think most of them have gotten over that fear.

Amanda Smith: Why do women do it?

Natasha Smits: That’s a really interesting question. I do believe that for younger teenage girls their first partners expect it. We do have a lot of girls - and that actually bothers me – there are a lot of younger women who come in and say that they wouldn’t even dream of not having it done and that the boys that they’ve started dating would definitely expect it. And those girls, I tend to undo a bit of business for myself and try talk them out of it, because I think it’s a terrible reason to start. I think for older women it’s about confidence, the confidence that women get. I mean I’ve had girls write me thank you cards, thank you you’ve changed my sex life. Because the confidence of feeling that groomed in an area that previously we didn’t really groom is quite liberating.

I also think that it’s exaggerating a feminine difference, men grow more hair naturally than women, women grow less hair naturally and I think that waxing it is really just exaggerating that. And that’s probably also why we don’t offer men’s Brazilian waxing because it’s not really an area we want to go into.

Amanda Smith: OK, I’ll let you get on with waxing just my legs Natasha – thank you

Amanda Smith: Didn’t hurt a bit. Amanda Smith with you on RN and The Body Sphere.

So the desirability of having pretty well all hair except what’s on your head removed: well you can blame it on Rio, or maybe on the ancient Greeks. Classical Greek sculpture has had a profound influence not just on Western art, but on how we think about our own bodies. And according to the art historian Michael Squire, on our attitudes to body hair.

Michael Squire: I think when we think about this question one of the things we have to think about is the reception of a particular sculpture by Praxitiles, and it’s made around 360 BC, and it’s a statue of the goddess Aphrodite. One of the things that’s so interesting about this statue when we’re thinking about body hair is that this statue shows a naked Aphrodite, and yet an Aphrodite without genitals and indeed without any body hair whatsoever. And one of the things that’s therefore so important about this is that it sets up a template for the ideal female body in the longer legacy of western art. So whenever we look at Renaissance Venus’s for example or indeed at neoclassical Venus’s, there’s this absence of pubic hair that comes from the Greek inheritance in particular.

There’s also this wonderful story of the Victorian art critic named John Ruskin and it’s a story about his ill fated wedding night. And John Ruskin takes his new bride to his bridal suite and sees her naked body for the first time. And he’s absolutely shocked to see that this woman not only has genitals but also pubic hair. And the story goes that he left the marriage forever unconsummated, and indeed they were divorced several years later.

Amanda Smith: And this was because supposedly all that he knew about women he’d learned from Greek sculpture?

Michael Squire: Absolutely, and not just from Greek sculpture but the whole classical tradition of western art. It’s a tradition that has this absence of female genitalia and this absence of pubic hair.

Amanda Smith: Why did the Greeks give men pubic hair on their sculptures but not the women?

Michael Squire: That’s a very good question and some people have tried to get round it by saying well perhaps the Aphrodite from Knidos had her pubic hair painted on, perhaps it wasn’t actually sculpted by painted – and of course you can see that’s going to be something of an argument of desperation. But I think it has to do with a kind of construction, a kind of impossible sort of womanhood, that has to do with a construct of what it means to be masculine as opposed to what it means to be feminine.

Amanda Smith: And you wonder if in years to come there will be more people like old John Ruskin who think that real grown women are as smooth and hairless as Greek statues. Michael Squire is the author of The Art of the Body: Antiquity and its Legacy.

Meredith Jones attributes the current trend for Brazilian waxing to something else. She’s a Senior Lecturer at the University of Technology in Sydney and one of her special subjects is body modification. Meredith what do you think has prompted it?

Meredith Jones: Well it’s a very interesting form of body modification this one. It’s one that I’ve definitely seen rise in my lifetime, just in the last ten years or so. And really it comes down to one thing, although that thing is linked to many other things, and that is pornography. As pornography has become more and more mainstream and more and more accessible it’s become necessary for pornography makers to get more and more competitive because obviously there’s a lot more of it out there. And they’ve upped the ante if you like, they’ve upped the ante in several ways that I won’t go into, but one of them is that they began to remove more and more pubic hair. That was men and women, just a way to sort of show more of what was happening. And it gradually became more and more standard. I

think that the first people who weren’t in some way involved in some sort of sex industry work who had Brazilians were doing it for kind of sexy or erotic reasons. But it’s now something that really is much more associated with what people think of as good grooming.

Amanda Smith: Well also having your body shaved or waxed or lasered may also simply be about how it feels nice to have smooth, silky skin. Sometimes it’s also about things like athletic performance, you know swimmers for example remove their body hair to swim faster, cyclists do that too. But as a fashion for women, Brazilian waxing is also leading to the rise of other possibly other more extreme procedures, and I’m talking about cosmetic genital surgery which I know you have written about. How is the hair removal leading to the surgical removal?

Meredith Jones: Well it’s a complex little path actually. The simple answer is that we can now see what’s down there. So maps of Tassie used to hide all the details, now if there’s no map of Tassie you can see what other women have down there, especially images that we see in the media. The more complex part of it is the relationship between the Brazilian wax and photo shop. The relationship there is to do with laws and regulations. There are laws in Australia and similar ones in the UK and the US that say that an image will get an X rating if it shows genitals in an explicit way. That’s usually interpreted by image makers to mean full frontal for men or for women to mean pink bits showing, if you like.

Now given that at least 50% of women have labia minora that protrude further than their labia majora this means that if those women have had a Brazilian wax then their labia minora are going to be on display; even if they are just standing up straight, so even if they are not in any sort of sexually explicit pose. So for fear of having those images X rated we got image makers using photo shop to get rid of those pink bits and then that in turn led to a whole lot of women seeing that every image of a woman’s vulva in the press didn’t include any labia minora, and therefore coming to the conclusion that perhaps their own vulvas were abnormal in some way. And going off to have them fixed. And of course cosmetic surgeons absolutely jumped on that and have completely fed that beast with a whole lot of propaganda about women’s self esteem.

Amanda Smith: Shame we just can’t photo shop ourselves

Meredith Jones: Indeed. You know I had a woman once who I was interviewing, not in relation to vulval cosmetic surgery, but in relation to her face, and she was yet to have her cosmetic surgery. We were flicking through a magazine together and she was telling me who she found beautiful. And she stopped at one image and could point out all of the ways that this image if this beautiful woman had been photo shopped and then said to me I wish we could just photo shop me now.

Amanda Smith: Well the other thing about the trend for hair removal, body hair removal, is that especially for women if you choose not to do it, if you choose not to wax your legs or your underarms never mind anywhere else, you’re kind of considered these days ugly or unhygienic. In a world where otherwise it seems to me having choice is considered a very valuable thing, we seem to be closing down choice in this area.

Meredith Jones: But things like body modification, and especially things that are temporary like hair removal, really are subject to fashion so I wouldn’t be at all surprised if in 40 or 50 years it’s again fashionable in some way for women to have some sort of body hair. You know there was a very brief trend just prior to the French Revolution for women to wear almost completely see through garments and to tease up their pubic hair and actually decorate it with strands of pearls and jewellery.

Amanda Smith: So this is a variation on a theme of the vajazzle?

Meredith Jones: Yes, it’s the vajazzle yes but it’s on a kind of afro! Yes, I do think it’s harder to be hairy though and removal of body hair has become a kind of fetish, it’s a fetish and the moment. It’s very hard to work against when the Kim Kardashians of this world are saying that the only hair on a woman’s body should be on her head.

Amanda Smith: Well for blokes there is the trend for manscaping now, if you’re a bloke you can have what’s bluntly described as a back, sack and crack. Is it different for men to be hairy or hairless at this point in time?

Meredith Jones: Yes it is. I think there’s still at least in people’s memory a time when hair on men was considered an indicator of their virility. You know that was definitely the case in the ‘70s. It’s still definitely possible to get away with being hairy and in fact beards have made a big comeback recently. I don’t think anyone could really still get away with having a hairy back and being considered sexy, but maybe that will come back one day. As you said before hairlessness on men is also associated with athleticism so swimmers and cyclists have done it for a long time. So being hairless for men isn’t just an indicator of being sexy it’s also sometimes an indicator of perhaps being a good sportsman.

Amanda Smith: It’s interesting; we do make a lot of work for ourselves, all this plucking and shaving and waxing and lasering. If only we really were the naked ape, but then we’d probably be inventing all sorts of intricate and painful ways to, I don’t know, to attach merkins or mohair stockings or chest rugs to ourselves.

Meredith Jones: Exactly, to add hair. I think it’s you know one of the sort of ongoing conditions of being human that we change our bodies and that we want what we don’t have or that we don’t want we do have.

Amanda Smith: And Meredith Jones is from the Institute for Interactive Media and Learning at the University of Technology Sydney.

I’m Amanda Smith and if you’ve got anything to add to this subject: personal experience or opinion or observation you know where to go - The Body Sphere website post a comment there and if you like you can subscribe to the podcast or listen to previous episodes of TheBody Sphere if there’s any that you’ve missed - at abc.net.au/radionational.

Guests

Mark Elgar

Evolutionary biologist

Meredith Jones

Cultural theorist

Natasha Smits

Beauty therapist

Michael Squire

Classicist and art historian

Credits

Presenter

Amanda Smith

Comments (14)

Terry :

20 Jan 2013 5:38:46pm

The program started with ` like our neanderthal ancestors'. I sincerely hope this sophomoric ingnorance isn't a foretaste of things to come. I was expecting something a _little_ more to do with this planet.[ObClue - try ` cousins'.

Rachael Cramp :

20 Jan 2013 5:39:46pm

I thought the program was interesting, however, there should have been more said about sexism and the huge pressure women are under to conform to Hollywood body standards.It is disturbing that teenagers think they need to get a Brazilian wax and this reflects on the porn industry and the portrayal of women as pre pubescent girls. The time and cost that women spend on their appearance is at least 5 times more than men based on my personal experience.Hair is natural and if I had never felt pressured (at the the of 11) to shave I would never have done it.

David Barry :

20 Jan 2013 8:12:55pm

It has been my belief that the reason we humans have such modified hair all over our body is because we were the aquatic apes. We are the ape that lives by the sea. It is also the reason we are the upright ape.

Goldele :

21 Jan 2013 1:40:16pm

It is so refreshing to hear this conversation in the public sphere.

This topic has been a personal battle ground and frustration for me since I became sexually active.

At high-school the boys would "rate" out of 10 how smooth our legs were. My mother always had hair in her underarms, and I was not allowed to shave my body and I was teased by my school mates. SO shame began.

Once I became sexually active and would talk with men and women about the pros, cons, preferences and feelings about body hair. I would propose that no pubic hair made a woman look like a pre-pubescent girl. When I would refuse brazilian waxes, and in my young ears as an outspoken feminist, a number of poor beauticians looked which shocked when I would say this.

My personal battle with my relationship to my body hair has seen me attempt to let my body hair grow, only to feel unattractive. Having had partners to like and dislike pubic hair so pandering to their preference.

I shall leave you with one of my favorite theatrical comment of body hair by the infamous playwright of the Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler. A Monologue called HAIRhttp://youtu.be/DuxyXSF4dpA

You cannot love a vagina unless you love hair. Many people do not love hair. My first and only husband hated hair. He said it was cluttered and dirty. He made me shave my vagina. It looked puffy and exposed and like a little girl. This excited him. When we made love to me, my vagina felt the way a beard must feel. It felt good to rub it, and painful. Like scratching a mosquito bite. It felt like it was on fire. There were screaming red bumps. I refused to shave it again. Then my husband had an affair. When we went to marital therapy, he said he screwed around because I wouldn’t please him sexually. I wouldn’t shave my vagina. Therapist had a think German accent and gasped between sentences to show her empathy. She asked me why I didn’t want to please my husband. I told her I thought it was weird. I felt little when my hair was gone down there, and I couldn’t help talking in a baby voice, and the skin got irritated and even calamine lotion wouldn’t help it. She told me marriage was a compromise. I asked her if shaving my vagina would stop him from screwing around. I asked her if she’d had many cases like this before. She said that questions diluted the process. I needed to jump in. She was sure it was a good beginning. This time, When we got home, he got to shave my vagina. It was like a therapy bonus prize. He clipped it a few times, and there was a little blood in the bathtub. He didn’t even notice it cause he was so happy shaving me. Then, later when my husband was pressing against me, I could feel his spiky sharpness sticking into me, my naked puffyvagina. There was no protection. There was no fluff. I realized then that hair is there for a reason---it’s the leaf around the flower, the lawn around the house. You have to l

Pamela :

21 Jan 2013 2:30:53pm

Pubic hair is there for a reason. Any male who demands a woman remove it, or is disgusted by it, has a problem of his own. 'Good grooming' can be a bikini wax and some soap and water. We need to think about who we're doing it for. Also, from a psychological viewpoint, why do these males prefer genitalia that looks like that of a little girl? Creepy.

deforested :

21 Jan 2013 2:43:58pm

Really enjoyed it. Over the years I have spent a lot of time and a LOT of money dealing with unwanted facial hair, in particular. I'm glad my generation didn't worry about pubic hair, at least! Also found the discussion about female genitals v interesting: for so long it bothered me greatly that I had 'pink bits' that showed. This stuff matters a lot. It matters that young women get accurate information.

pat moore :

I agree with Rachael. Though internet-popularized pornography was rightly cited as the source inspiring the fashion of hairless adult women there was no mention of the originating source of that pornographic obsession itself which is fantasized sex with prepubescent girl children ie paedo "philia" (more properly abuse). Cold Greek marble statues, photoshop & plastic Barbi dolls speak of man-maleable, manmade,'civilized', tamed, perfected & "madeover" woman, removed from the real, the natural animal Earthiness of hairy ape woman who would remind man of his own animality?...a Pygmalion project? An Athena, motherless daughter, sprung-from-the-fathergod-Zeus' head alone without input from any Earth goddess? A man-fashioned compliant doll, a 'Stepford wife', a fetish object. The global epidemics of brutal rape & murder perhaps speak of this massmedia fetishization of woman, consequent of her being made into a thing for male sexual consumption & gratification?

The politics of hair runs deep??...how far we've fallen since "Hair" the musical!!!

Anthony Cole :

21 Jan 2013 4:37:29pm

Peter Wheeler, in the 1980s and 1990s proposed that we lost our body hair as we developed increased sweating, to improve thermoregulation. This improved thermoregulation allowed us to run for very much longer than our non-sweating, hairy prey, so that we could run them to exhaustion.

Here is a recent update of the current supporting evidence for the hypothesis:

Cathy Lewis :

22 Jan 2013 12:34:20am

No reference to feminist theory? Hmm, did you consider the link between the incidence of child molestation (usually by dad, less so by the local priest or pedophile) and the male attraction to prepubescence in women? Personally I shave nothing in protest.

Philippa :

23 Jan 2013 4:01:47pm

Amanda, I'm so glad you're back on air again. Just listening to the episode on body hair removal, particularly pubic hair. What a fascinating thought, that looking like a plucked chicken, and face it, that's what the whole pubic area looks like without pubic hair, is considered sexy!!! Under arm hair and pubic hair are what makes a naked woman look sexy. Where did this idea come from that it doesn't? Ok, a bit of a trim around the edges if it's out of control, but where are these guys coming from? I have to say, I can't imagine any guy who would actually say " sorry, can't go there cos you're not waxed" A few friends of mine and one of their daughters were having a chat about it one day, and the daughter was saying she always waxed and we were asking her why. " Oh it's so much cooler" she said. Well, we all cracked up and decided we didn't realise it was so hot down there! Thank for your great program. Cheers, Philippa